The director Owen Wilson had a problem with: “There was something hard to stomach”
For someone who made their name – and their bed – in mainstream comedy, Owen Wilson often gets overlooked for the multitude of talents he possesses, ones that haven’t always been at the forefront of casting agents or the filmmakers hoping to secure his talents.
He’s an Academy Award-nominated writer after penning The Royal Tenenbaums alongside Wes Anderson and a Golden Globe-nominated actor thanks to his performance in Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, but ask 100 people to describe Wilson in one word, and 99 of them will probably say “wow”.
Wilson has been a key member of Anderson’s inner circle since the beginning, co-writing his first three features and starring in seven all told, but his biggest hits have tended to come when he leans into his laconic everyman persona to play the laid-back presence generating sparks with a more fired-up co-star.
The Jackie Chan duology Shanghai Knights and Shanghai Noon, Vince Vaughn’s Wedding Crashers, Ben Stiller’s Starsky & Hutch, and Pixar’s Cars franchise have made him a recognisable, bankable, and welcome presence on-screen. Still, Wilson was forced to swallow his pride, suck it up, and do the work when he was presented with an entirely different type of project.
On the surface, The Wendell Baker Story was hardly different from many movies Wilson had made before, with the star playing a retirement home boss who embezzles money from the residents, only to have his scheme ripped apart from the inside out when a con artist shows up on the scene to set things right.
A routine comedy on the surface, then, but a huge challenge for Wilson. Why? Because his younger brother Luke played the lead role, wrote the screenplay, and also co-directed with older sibling Andrew. Needless to say, it was a situation that took some getting used to.
“I had more of a problem with my younger brother directing me,” he admitted to the BBC. “I could kind of accept it from my older brother, but Luke? There was something hard to stomach about Luke giving me line readings and so I asked him to communicate any of his direction to Andrew, and that’s the way it worked.”
Once he’d managed to overcome the hurdles of a production where he was the middle child sandwiched in between his brothers calling the shots, Wilson said they “both did a really good job” on The Wendell Baker Story, putting the sibling rivalry to one side in order to salute the professionalism and skills of the guys he grew up with.
Not that audiences had much of an idea, however, when the $8million feature earned a little over $150,000 at the box office after releasing more than two years after its premiere at the 2005 South by Southwest festival.
